Glass Tiger
- Автор: Горес Джо
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Quercus
- ISBN: 978-1-84724-072-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Glass Tiger». Краткое содержание книги:
When he walked into his office in the Hoover Building, his phone was ringing. He snapped into it, ‘I told you, no calls!’
‘Didn’t tell me,’ said a male voice in a twangy, down-home accent straight out of Maine.
Sammy Spaulding. They’d been classmates at Quantico. Hatfield had qualified for Hostage/Rescue, Sammy had ended up as AIC of the LA Field Office. Adrenaline shot through Hatfield. An hour after he had left the Oval Office, he had e-mailed a BOLO marked HIGHEST PRIORITY to major FBI FOs around the country:
Be on the look-out for any use of temporary credentials issued in the name of Brendan Thorne.
‘Talk to me, Sammy. Tell me you’ve got something I need.’
‘What I’ve got is an irate call this morning from a night administrator at Cedar’s-Sinai Hospital. Seems some guy claiming to be one of our agents interrogated her last night concerning a former patient. She thought the i.d. was fake, so she memorized the number on the commission card. A real pain in the butt.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Hatfield impatiently. ‘Whose credentials were they?’
‘Your buddy’s. Brendan fucking Thorne’s. She shined him on to the day people, but he never showed. You want me to—’
‘No!’ In a quieter voice, Hatfield said, ‘I’m under orders to handle this one personally. I’ll be out there tomorrow a.m.’
‘I’ll lay in some barbecue ribs and grits and water-melon.’
‘Up yours,’ said Hatfield.
Thorne got a room for the night in a run-down motel below the Sunset Strip, next door to a bar that closed at two a.m. and opened again at four. When he did get to sleep, sometime around three a.m., he woke from his already horribly familiar nightmare, drenched in sweat and yelling, ‘You missed,’ with Corwin’s reply, ‘Did I?’ following hard upon it in his memory. He had to stand under a cold shower for twenty minutes before he could face the day.
Walter Houghton, MD, had his practice in a medical office building on Doheny a few blocks from Cedar’s-Sinai. Thorne told the receptionist that his name was Brendan Thorne. ‘I don’t have an appointment, but if the doctor could spare me just two or three minutes...’
But she was already nodding brightly at him through the sliding glass panel separating her from the waiting room.
‘Have a seat, Mr. Thorne. Doctor will see you directly.’
He sat down, alarm bells ringing. Houghton had the sort of upscale practice that usually meant days or weeks before getting an appointment. Had Werfel phoned the doctor an early-morning heads-up? Was the FBI on its way? He had to chance it. He didn’t have anything else.
Ten minutes later, he was shown into the crowded office of a handsome, lean, erect black man of about his own age. Houghton had beautiful liquid eyes and stern features. His white smock was crisp and he had a stethoscope around his neck.
As he shook Thorne’s hand, he said, ‘I hear the dragon lady over at Cedar’s worked you over pretty good last night. The nurse who gave you my name put in a good word for you, but I feel protective about Janet. She was brutally beaten with feet and fists. At least no knives, clubs or soda bottles. Ended up with a broken arm and broken collarbone, a cracked shin, a permanent metal pin in one wrist, two cracked ribs, and a bruised but not ruptured spleen. If you’re bringing her more trouble...’
‘I just want to ask her about a friend of hers.’
‘Can I believe that?’ asked Houghton almost to himself. ‘Well, we’ll see. If your friend was involved in any way...’
‘No friend, I’ve never met him. I’m just looking for him.’
They locked eyes. Houghton looked away first.
‘Okay. All the evidence of sexual assault was there, but no oral, anal, or vaginal penetration took place. She was gutsy and stoic at the same time. Never a word of complaint. Not even a groan out of her. She just took it. A couple of days later, a quiet, tough outdoorsman in his fifties talked with me at the hospital. He said he’d like to kill the man who did it. I asked if he was a tough guy, and he said No, just an angry one.’
‘Did he give you a name, address, anything?’
‘Nothing. I never saw him again. He left a cash deposit here when I was at the hospital that more than paid for her medical and doctor expenses. He’s even got a refund coming.’
‘Did Janet leave an address with you?’
He evaded a direct answer by saying, ‘She checked herself out of the hospital before she should have, saw me twice here at the office, then never came back. Thanks for stopping by.’
Dismissal. Without even thinking, Thorne said, ‘There’s a psychiatrist in D.C. named Sharon Dorst.’ He rattled off her number. ‘Call her. Ask her about Thorne.’
Houghton hesitated, then handed Thorne a card with his office phone and fax on it.
‘Give me a day to think about it,’ he said.
29
Thorne knew he should get out of LA as soon as possible. Right now the FBI could be putting an intercept tap on the doctor’s phone. But he couldn’t leave empty-handed. Janet Kestrel was who he was looking for. He had no other possible leads. Maybe Houghton had believed him. Maybe he even would call Sharon Dorst.
So, a day for Houghton to think, a day for Thorne to kill. He decided to start at the Los Angeles Main Library at Figueroa and Flower, a venerable place with mosaics around the interior of the rotunda depicting the founding of the city by Spanish priests. At the main reference desk on the second floor, he paid five dollars for access to one of their computers, used a key word search to call up the post-nomination press coverage of Wallberg’s campaign that he’d barely glanced through before being forced to abandon it at the Mayflower Hotel.
He found a filler item he’d missed in D.C. A man had tried to rob one of Wallberg’s media consultants in the gift shop at the El Tovar Hotel on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. The consultant’s name was Nisa Mather.
Since Flagstaff and Phoenix were the population centers closest to Grand Canyon National Park, Thorne brought up their papers’ coverage of the event. The candidate, Gus Wallberg, was hiking down on the canyon floor when a grey-haired, uniformed man mopping the gift shop floor spoke to Nisa Mather for a minute or so, then tried to grab her purse.
She screamed for security, the man fled with what one fanciful reporter called a wounded-wolf lope, and jumped into a dark green SUV driven by a woman. Another Wallberg aide, Kurt Jaeger, ran after the 4x4 but couldn’t get the license number.
Corwin? Asking why she betrayed him? Maybe threatening to kill her husband? So she screamed for security, then said he’d tried to snatch her purse. In a way, gave him enough time to escape, with Janet Kestrel driving the get-away vehicle?
Back in the Post’s coverage, he found an even more provocative item. Two weeks before election night, Wallberg was relaxing for a day at the posh Desert Palms Resort and Spa in California’s Mojave Desert. While taking a midnight dip alone in the spa’s natural hot springs pool, he was accosted by a naked man. Secret Service agents fired shots, the assailant fled.
The man being naked, far from branding him as a nut in Thorne’s eyes, suggested that the intruder had been Corwin. At night in unknown terrain, you could move much more quietly naked.
He Googled the Desert Palms Resort and Spa, then used one of his phone cards to make a one-night reservation for Benjamin Schutz. Yes, mid-week, they had a single available.